[ih] Installed base momentum (was Re: Design choices in SMTP)

[vinton cerf]

and frame relay
v


On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 11:33 AM Barbara Denny via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>  Let's not forget about ATM. I  think ATM was also a big area of focus for
> many people in this time frame.
> barbara
>
>     On Friday, February 10, 2023 at 06:48:47 AM PST, Craig Partridge via
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>  On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 7:16 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > At the time, in the 1990ish timeframe, there was a huge installed base
> > of network technology.  Hundreds of thousands of computers utilizing
> > networks based on SNA, SPX, XNS, Decnet, etc. etc.  TCP existed, but
> > was a small player, confined largely to the academic and research
> > communities.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > So how did TCP manage to blast through that momentum of the installed
> > base, creating such a chaos in the collision?  And how did it do it so
> > rapidly?
> >
> >
> Hi Jack:
>
> I'll start with a shout out to Brian's point that the transition was
> already well underway by 1990.  Absolutely
> fits my experience.
>
>  I would argue that a critical issue was communicating outside one's
> organization and/or over long distance.  The various technologies you list,
> except for DECNET, did not focus on solving problems across organizational
> boundaries.  Recall Netware was the
> biggest networking technology of the time and, while it adapted somewhat,
> was designed to connect an office or suite
> of offices.
>
> Meanwhile, by 1987, we'd built a relatively homogeneous email environment
> across the Internet, USENET, CSNET, and
> (thanks to BITNET and EARN) the academic SNA networks.  I remember at a DC
> Interop c. 1990, someone observing
> that they had discovered couldn't hire new computing graduates if they
> weren't connected to the RFC 822/domain name email
> network.  So the tech mindset, among the younger generation, was that they
> should be able to communicate with anyone via
> email.  This pushed folks towards TCP/IP -- or, at least, email
> compatibility with the Internet.
>
> At a bits-and-bytes level, long-distance reliable communications networks
> are hard to do.  I remember Dave Clark talking about
> this around 1985 and discussing how protocol suites designed around the
> local network didn't scale.  He used the struggles by
> the LOCUS distributed file system (which worked great on a LAN) to work
> over the ARPANET as an example.  In the late 1980s,
> only two networking architectures had engaged with and worked through those
> issues: TCP/IP and DECNET.  Nicely, the most prominent and
> complementary papers on congestion issues, one by Van Jacobson (TCP/IP) and
> one by Raj Jain and KK Ramakrishnan (DECNET),
> were presented back-to-back at the ACM SIGCOMM conference in 1988.  So if
> you were looking to build (or soon after via NSFNET, connect
> to) a sturdy wide-area network, unless you were a DEC VMS organization,
> your best choice was TCP/IP.
>
> I'll note it was, in my view, a near thing sometimes.  NSFNET was a
> tremendous gamble and for parts of 1987 and 1988 was not
> a very good service (I'm told a scientist complained loudly at the National
> Academy about this non-functional network they were
> trying to use for important science).  We figured out congestion collapse
> well enough for the time (pace buffer-bloat folks) just as
> it was threatening to make the Internet unusable.  But I distinctly
> remember that roughly around the end of 1988 or beginning of 1989,
> Internet folks began to realize that when they were talking with engineers
> building other networking technologies there was a whole
> suite of community knowledge that the Internet folks had and nobody else
> (except the wonderful DEC networking team) did.
>
> Craig
>
>
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